PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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9.1 Introduction: The Significance of the M0 Case Study
This chapter looks at the financing of the Budapest ring road M0 as an instructive
case study of how international, national, regional and local transport and land use policy
interests interact, and to how they sometimes complement each other, sometimes conflict.
Much like general environmental discourses around European transport policy, the M0
“case” really consists of multiple discourses. Different spatial contexts result in different
sustainability discourses. And as always, different discursive frameworks privilege
different sets of arguments. In this chapter, I will apply my developed typology of
discursive frameworks for “sustainable” transport policy decision-making to a concrete
case study and compare how the overarching themes, key concepts and policy proposals
of the five different discursive frameworks are reflected in the local controversies over a
large-scale infrastructure. We will also re-identify our two key pro-construction
rationales from Chapter 6, namely the “missing links” storyline which justifies the
Budapest ring road as a part of the Pan-European transport networks, and also the locallevel
“bottleneck” storyline which demands road infrastructure expansion due to rising
traffic levels. 1
However, as I will demonstrate below, these two storylines do not
adequately capture the diversity of arguments for and against this key international link.
The M0 case study is the only chapter in the “realities” part of this study that
explicitly aims to take account of the actual effects of large-scale infrastructures at the
local level. Due to the predominantly discourse-analytical focus of this study, this is a
dimension which we have not closely investigated so far, but which we will pay
1 Interestingly, the cohesion and polycentricity storylines are less suitable for justifying the ring road, since
these storylines mostly stress parity of access and balanced urbanization at a national/international (rather
than at a metropolitan) scale, meaning that the related arguments would necessarily tend to dissuade rather
than encourage a concentration of additional infrastructure capacity in the already privileged, highly
urbanized capital region of Hungary (also see discussions below).